Where Are All the Good Cafes in the Mission?
Before you start listing places like Ritual or Muddy Waters in answer to this question, understand my criteria. A good café, to me is not over crowded with good looking people who have either modeled for or are about to start modeling for American Apparel. Also, a good café will stay open until at least 11pm, will offer reasonably priced –if not cheap and a little swanky- beer and wine. A good café will have free Wi Fi and preferably, a couch. Decent Latin Jazz, live violinists, and coffee that doesn’t taste like old rotten shoes are completely optional.
Like many people living in the Mission, I work a desk job all day where I type, type, type, type, type little reports and emails, etc. So at the end of a long day, I’m willing to admit that I need a cheap glass of wine or a pint of beer when I sit back down to type some more. As much as I love writing, I love writing even more with a little bit of a buzz.
When I lived in Northbeach, three things were common ground: everyone was a writer in some way or another, everyone was a wino, and no one who actually lived in the neighborhood appreciated all of the suburban “gangstas” and frat boys that invade the place from Friday through Sunday night. What I’m finding now, though, is that being a wino greatly depended on there being a Trader Joes in the Northbeach and the fact that every café served $2.50 glasses (filled to the top) of wine. $1.50 for white wine spritzers.
Café Revolution, no matter how much I adore it, serves $6 half filled glasses of wine. Beer is $5 – which is reasonable, but not if you’re a broke writer. Also, Café Revolution is so crowded that even if you did find a place to sit down and write you’d have ten other people at your little table watching every word you write. I may be a wino, but I’m also a fairly private person about my writing.
Café La Boheme is nice. Cheap beer, moderately reasonably priced wine, and a good crowd of old fogies playing chess. They even have great music and lots of weirdos of all kinds - both a must for good writing. It’s a block from my apartment to boot – but I can’t keep going to the same place night after night and be expected to write anything even remotely creative. It’s just not going to happen.
I’ve tried drinking from brown paper bags at Dolores Park, which is excellent until nightfall when it just gets really cold and really sketchy for a drunk woman alone pretty quickly. I’ve also tried trying to write at bars. Usually, it’s too dark or else I get hit on which is more annoying that having to pay $6 for cheap wine.
I figure that there are hundreds of writers in the Mission, and since there are thousands of run down apartments like mine, the chances of there being a broke writer who lives in one of these apartments is pretty high. And I’d like to assume, although I see no evidence of it, that these people, like me don’t really like hanging out all the time and working in their run down apartments. Also, they like to drink a glass of wine here or there as they work. I’m not looking for a writing community, drinking buddy, or even someone to chat with in line at a café. I really just want to know where all the good cafes are – where are all these hundreds of writers working and drinking? They’re certainly not all hanging out at La Boheme or Revolution.
